Damian Myron Writes

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Outlining Dig Down – Phase 3

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Once I had determined that Rob’s personality was going to be dominated by a martyr complex, I worked on giving Rob the fuel to drive that complex. I don’t believe we start out thinking the cards are stacked against us every time we face an obstacle. As babies, we’ll fail constantly as we learn how to stand and walk. We don’t just give up immediately when we fail constantly or think the world is out to get us, so I felt it was important for Rob to experience something that would convince him he was constantly being persecuted.

 It was at this point that I shaped the relationship that Rob had with Preston as a tumultuous one.  I made the decision that Rob was always seeking his father’s love and approval, and never feeling like he got either.

As with the previous layer, this is what Rob’s backstory looks like when viewed through the filter of a son constantly rebuffed:

As a kid, Rob always felt neglected by his father, who spent his time growing his company. Preston missed so many of Rob’s big moments growing up that Rob began to consider Franklin & Moore as Preston’s other child whom he loved more. After graduating from college, Rob believed he’d have a prestigious job waiting for him at his father’s company, possibly because his father had always promised him there’d be a job waiting for once he graduated. Preston had other plans in mind. Rob still strove to achieve his father’s respect by selling to all his friends, even setting sales records in the process. Preston kept him in the position until his pool of friends dried up. Rob began to struggle and massively overspent trying to attract new clients.

 On the brink of being fired, and in an act of defiance to Preston, Rob goes into business with Axel, the biggest client the firm has ever seen, and a shady businessman Preston would never work with. Part of him believed he’d never earn his father’s respect following in his footsteps, but if he could show the old man he could succeed by his own methods, he’d finally get the love and respect he always felt he lacked from his father.

The firm’s profits skyrocket as Rob and Axel conduct shady business. Even with the success, Preston doesn’t like that all of Rob’s recommendations benefit Axel. Their relationship becomes adversarial. Preston isn’t dad anymore. Even after achieving more success, Preston disapproves. The firm’s clients evaporate, and Rob doesn’t have the money to support his growing drug habit. Rob believes he can’t afford to fail, that he needs to beat Preston in order to achieve his respect. He agrees to launder money for the cartel. With money steadily flowing in, he lives a lavish lifestyle he’s constantly flaunting. He no longer wants to convince Preston he’s surpassed him, he wants to convince everyone.

Everything is going fine until Congressman Spears is arrested and the wheels start to fall off. Rob, like Preston, has built something, and though Rob’s creation is far greater than Preston ever dared to dream, the harder he works, the quicker everything collapses. Through it all, he feels Preston is the author of his misfortune, and goes to him to find out why his father hates him so he can try to understand what he has to change in order to get Preston to help him escape.

This change was fundamental to Dig Down becoming more than just an idea. It was important that Rob appear sympathetic at first, and I felt living with this chip on his shoulder accomplished that, giving his misguided actions plausibility. This also solved the problem I had when I came up with the idea in 2011 of why Preston wouldn’t help his when he came to him for money. In addition to being sick (which was always a part of Preston’s character), having this philosophical difference that torpedoed Preston’s life’s work and strained his relationship with his son to the point where they’ve been estranged for some time felt like perfect reasons for why Rob would feel like it would be a challenge to get support from his father in his darkest hour.

Next week, I go over Preston’s perspective as he watched his son’s downward spiral.

My Story (Part 4)

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Ryan seethed at the juxtaposition. Whereas he had broken out in a sweat, Horace donned his famous eat shit grin.

His scrawny frame tensed up as the thief ambled over. His first instinct was to take his freshly filled notepad and run.

Relax. You knew this would happen when he saw you. Just don’t blow it.

Ryan quelled his urge to run, instead busying himself with items on his desk. The last thing he wanted was to let Horace know how much he loathed the thief.

No, the last thing he wanted was for Horace to figure out how much he wanted to exact revenge.

“Good evening, Ryan,” Horace greeted him heartily.

The salutation was in the same tone it had always been, but now Ryan saw it for what it was. The opening line in a con to gain his trust.

“Evening,” Ryan replied, sparing him a quick glance over his shoulder. 

“Okay, I was worried about a chilly reception,” Horace said. “You’re mad I got the credit for that story. Your source, um…”

“Anthony?” Ryan offered absently. His source’s name was actually Andy.

“Yeah, Anthony!” Horace said, confirming he hadn’t interviewed the man, just slapped his name on the story Ryan had written and gotten it to Frank first. “I guess he called to give an additional detail he had forgotten to tell you. He never mentioned your name, so I thought I was breaking a story. Believe me, if I had known that it was yours, I would’ve taken down what Anthony said and delivered it to you personally. I mean, what a story!”

Ryan shrugged, feigning interest, and hoping Horace was buying his acting. “Stories come and go.”

He could feel Horace eye him curiously. “I can see that.” He pointed to Ryan’s open notepad. “You got a good one? Looked like your hand couldn’t keep up.”

Ryan quickly flipped the notepad shut. “I might be on to something,” he said guardedly.

“Care to share over coffee?” Horace asked, taking a presumptive step toward the break room.

“Sorry, can’t,” Ryan said curtly.

That stopped Horace. His eat shit grin flickered for a moment. “Come on,” he cajoled. “If there’s any bad blood, we can hash it out. I’m telling you, this is just a tragic misunderstanding. I’m really sorry it happened.”

If you were really sorry, why didn’t you go to Frank when you found whose story it was?

He kept that question to himself, bottled up inside. For now, it took everything to look polite but firm on the outside.

“No hard feelings,” Ryan assured him. “Like I said, stories come and go.” He leaned in closer to him, as if to share a secret. “And this story…everyone will forget about my last one. Well…not mine. Yours. But it’s okay. Once I write this one, I’ll forget all about the snafu that give you credit for my story.”

“Really?” Horace asked, intrigued. 

Ryan nodded, but offered nothing more. He could see the thief’s face crumble under the suspense.

“What is it?” Horace finally asked, then gave a blustery laugh to mask how forcefully he had posed the question.

“Sorry,” Ryan said, turning away from him. “My source said to get there ASAP. I’ve got to grab a photographer. We’re going to want pictures of this.” He paused. “Actually, Frank’ll probably want video footage of this we can send to news outlets. You know how he loves it when they have to credit us with a story.”

He fished out his keys and started for the elevator. Behind him, Horace took the place he vacated by his desk.

Ryan could feel the thief’s eyes widen. “You do think I stole your story, don’t you? You don’t trust me anymore.”

He turned to face Horace. “I really have to get going,” he insisted. Ryan flashed him a smile. “Relax. I know your true intentions,” he said before continuing on his way.

Horace watched him frantically press the button for the elevator before abandoning it hurriedly for the stairs. When the plucky reporter was out of sight, he turned back toward Ryan’s desk, picked up the notepad he had left behind, and rushed to the opening elevator.

The thief had dashed into the elevator so quickly, he didn’t even notice that the door to the stairwell was slightly ajar. Nor did he see Ryan peering through it, watching him, smiling.

He took the bait.

Outlining (Digging Deeper)

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After outlining a quick rundown of Rob’s past, I next chose to delve into Rob’s motivation for getting mixed up in all the crimes he’d eventually be charged with. This stage of the outline really helped me understand who Rob was, and really established the character he turned into.

What kind of person would do these things?

That was the question I had to ask myself. It was possible that Rob could’ve been your prototypical “everyman” who just got dealt a bad hand too many times until he was forced to help others break the law just to make ends meet. But knowing the actions I had in store for Rob once the story got going, I knew that wouldn’t be right for the character. Not exactly.

Rob wasn’t a good guy who just got dealt a bad hand. But he’d THINK he was.

When I’d originally conceived on this idea in 2011, Rob was only guilty of the sin of omission, aware of criminal activities while not actively participating in them until things got out of hand and people wanted him dead before he could incriminate them. The more I thought about it, the more I believed my main character’s path leading up to story had to be forged by decisions he’d knowingly made, not bad situations that happened to him. This decision made his later actions when he was in Preston’s townhouse and throughout his escape more believable. It also helped give a reason for Preston’s refusal to help, something I didn’t have 8 years ago.

This choice also gave Rob depth, because although he engaged in activities that ultimately led to his downfall, I felt he was someone who didn’t believe he was a bad guy. Going back to what type of person the main character for this story would be, I felt they would be someone who went through life believing nothing they did was ever their fault and everything bad that happened was out of their control.

As I conceived the character of Rob, I gave him a martyr complex. You may have noticed most times when Rob is in a tense situation, his immediate thought is to think “Of COURSE this has to happen to me.”

Rob’s view of life was meant to echo the feeling of the title Dig Down. He’d make a bad decision that led to unfavorable consequences. Instead of accepting blame, he’d feel the world was out to get him, and use this as justification to make another poor decision that would lead him even worse off. As I went over his backstory, I wanted to craft it so that if he, at any point, just took responsibility (and his lumps) he’d be in a bad situation, but at least he’d stop there and could work towards turning things around.

This was the rundown of his backstory with his martyr complex applied:

Rob felt he should’ve had a job waiting for him at his father’s company once he graduated college. Because of this expectation, he never applied himself, which didn’t sit well with Preston. He felt slighted when given a junior salesman position, but he had plenty of friends he could make a quick sale too, hoping to impress his father and get fast tracked to the once denied executive position. When that doesn’t happen, he believes his father is holding him back, and with no more quick sales, his career takes a nosedive.

Believing he’s about to be fired, Axel, a shady businessman, approaches him, offering him plenty of business if he helps manipulate stocks for him. Rob does this, achieving success beyond anything Preston has accomplished. Through Axel, he meets Vicky, his underage addict daughter. He falls in love, and woos her by scoring drugs for her, eventually getting hooked himself. To support his ever growing drug habit, he agrees to launder money for the cartel when they approach him with a solution to his financial struggles.

Things seem fine for a time, but one of his conspirators gets mixed up in a public scandal, and dominoes start to fall. Being one of the closest people mixed up in this scandal, Rob calls on the cartel to kill the tarnished accomplice before the scheme can be brought to light, but is too late in doing so. With their crimes exposed, and Rob under the spotlight of the media, the remaining parties look to clean house before they draw the attention of law enforcement.

As you can see, I started him off with just being lazy, and always taking the easy way out. As life got tougher for him, he kept digging his heels in, until he had no other choice but to help break the law. From there, his willingness to commit crimes became easier, and the scope of his crimes grew with each new obstacle.

“Good decisions are hard to make, but easy to live with. Bad decisions are easy to make, but hard to live with.”

While I was going through this stage of the outline, this quote came to mind, and I wanted to make sure it applied to every decision Rob made. I’m not certain of it’s origin, but I’d heard it from a YouTube channel by Brian Tracy. He’s recorded countless videos on motivation and productivity, and if you’re ever looking for either, check his channel out.

Next week, I detail why Rob’s personality led him to always take the easy way out.

My Story (Part III)

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Even sitting, Ryan’s knees became wobbly as his source fed him the hook for the story. On the other end of the line, the voice was asking if he was still there.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m still here,” Ryan said, snapping out of it.

He had gone lightheaded with euphoria.

His pencil snapped under the frantic force he was using to jot the story down as fast as he could. When he looked down at his scribbled notes, he counted at least five grammatical errors. He tore the page out of his notepad, balled it up, grabbed another pencil, and as calmly as he could manage, asked his source to start again from the top.

This story is gonna be huge, Ry. Don’t fuck it up!

The gravity of the story dragged his thoughts to the thief. His neck whipped around towards Horace’s office door.

Still closed.

He could feel his source on the other end of the line grow more impatient by the millisecond. This was a juicy development where they worked, and it was clear to Ryan that they wanted to get back to work before their absence was noticed.

For Ryan’s part, he wanted to get the story as quickly as they wanted to give it. But he knew there was another dynamic at play. The thief was an obstacle, and would swipe this story too if he wasn’t careful.

Paranoid, he twisted his neck back towards Horace’s office. In the split second it took him to do so, he had the unshakable feeling that the door would swing open if his eyes didn’t reach it fast enough.

Still closed.

With that fear subsided (for now), Ryan soaked in the story, finding he had never felt this level of craving before. Each detail bred another question.

If his ears could salivate, his neck would be drenched.

His hand cramped as he hungrily filled page after page of his notepad with shorthand. His mind worked overtime juggling all the details he was being fed. His neighbor asked him to stop the incessant toe tapping.

The words he scribbled down were a jumbled mess. Taking down the story he was given had always come naturally to him, but that wasn’t what was happening here.

After every couple of lines, he’d snap his neck back towards Horace’s office. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being observed.

Still closed.

After filling five pages, his source stated they were done, they had to get back, and asked if Ryan had everything he needed. Ryan recited every word they had told him in his head, and when he was convinced he wasn’t ever going to forget the story that made his career, he agreed to let them off the line.

He hung up, then flipped to the front of his notes and reexamined everything. His concern was that his hastily written notes wouldn’t make sense to anyone that read them. When he was done reading, he slowly lowered his pad, and smiled.

His smile quickly dissipated. Slowly, he willed himself to peek around the newsroom. He swiveled in his chair until he was facing the thief’s door.

Still closed.

He didn’t see you, Ryan thought, as he continued  to spin his chair back toward his desk. His rotation halted as he faced the break room opposite Horace’s office.

Horace stood in its doorway, watching him.

Outlining – Phase 1: Surface Level

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Before sitting down to finally write Dig Down, one of the first things I had to determine was what illegal activities had Rob gotten involved in. In essence, what had happened that led up to him being in the desperate state he found himself in at the start of the story. I knew I wanted him facing a slew of charges, and wanted him to have a lot of unsavory characters on his tail. But in order for all that to happen, I needed to not only know what he’d done, but more importantly, I needed to know what had led to his involvement in all those crimes.

One of the first things I did was brainstorm all sorts of criminal activities that Rob could’ve gotten mixed up in. From there, I started to rule out things that, while Rob could’ve been capable of being involved in, that he wasn’t going to have done. The crimes I kept helped shape Rob’s character. At the time, I had no idea what Rob did for a living, but being involved in stock manipulation and insider trading determined for me that he was going to be a broker.

Although I wanted him to face a litany of charges, I also needed it to be understandable why he did the things he did. That helped me pare the list of crimes to its final form, though it did lead to another difficult cut. Early on, as a way to explain how he’d come up with the money to rent a car and pay a coyote, I had planned for him to embezzle money from a charity he’d created. The more noble the charity’s goal, the better. Ultimately, I felt this choice might be too inexcusable, and just left the financing of his escape to the money he’d borrowed from the loan shark.

With all that settled, I crafted a personal history for Rob that outlined not only what he did, but the surface level reason for every action, and is as follows:

Rob graduated college feeling his father would have a top job waiting for him at his company. When Preston gave him a junior salesman position, after some initial success making guaranteed sales to his friends, he began to flounder, until Axel, a businessman without morals with friends in Congress, approached him with a lucrative, though illegal, deal. On the verge of being fired, Rob played ball. Through his partnership with Axel, the “Cowboy”, he met Axel’s daughter Vicky, who he fell in love with, and courted by scoring drugs for her. He began to use as well. Needing to support his escalating addiction, he starts pump and dump scams, until the firm’s clientele starts to vanish. Being a regular with dealers, he is approached by the head of a cartel to launder money through the firm, in exchange for drugs and a share of the profits. He feels invincible, until a strong supporter in Congress gets caught with a dead hooker in a very public way. Needing to hush up the Congressman before they can talk, Rob approaches the cartel to assassinate the prisoner. They agree, in exchange for him being a mule for their drugs. When the Congressman dies, the investigation intensifies, and other hookers step forward, incriminating everyone in the operation. Parties involved look to clean house, and that means silencing Rob. Permanently. Parties include Axel, the Congressman, the pimp of the hookers, and the cartel.

This was the initial rundown that I came up with for Rob’s backstory, and after reading the finished product, you can see I made changes along the way. But like a house, the foundation had been laid.

What I needed to do next was dig deeper into Rob’s motivation to help shape his backstory and focus and tighten the story even more. Next week, I dig down deeper into Rob’s reasoning for every bad decision he made.

My Story (Part II)

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Even by the time he reached his desk, Ryan had still refused to accept any culpability in losing the story. As far as he was concerned, it was his baby, his birthright, and it didn’t matter if the paper had given that snake sole credit.

It also didn’t matter to him how many people had told him to beware of the thief. How often they compared Horace to a vulture, circling around the other reporters, waiting to pick up a juicy story that he could swoop in and claim for himself. 

How many others he had done this to already?

The pulitzer winning reporter had been so friendly to him, an ambitious nobody, fresh out of college, looking to make a name for himself. It didn’t seem possible that Horace was the heartless betrayer the whole paper made him out to be.

Ryan had rationalized the collective attitude in his head. It had to be jealousy, that Horace, a decorated reporter, was simply superior to the rest of them, that they couldn’t stand the praise lavished on Husk year after year, and decided to shun him in shallow retribution.

He ignored the fact that they all told the same story, using that to strengthen his own reasoning of what was going on. That they each said practically the same thing showed they lacked ingenuity and creativity, and that was why Horace surpassed them again and again.

He groaned at the recollection that he had sworn not to turn into his colleagues.

His mentor’s betrayal forced him to look at their warnings as what they always were: facts. They all gave the same testimony because he had stolen from each of them the same way.

What killed him was this happened to him because he had committed a cardinal sin as a reporter. He had ignored the truth because it didn’t fit with the story he wanted to tell himself.

Never again.

Replaying the betrayal in the harsh light of hindsight over and over again forced Ryan to reassess the duplicity with a new perspective. He still refused to accept that the story now dominating the headlines belonged to anyone else, but oddly, this no longer ate at him like it did when he first stormed into Frank’s office.

His focus now was to not end up like the rest of the druthers he worked with. The last thing Ryan wanted was to remain haunted by Horace’s treachery for years, opting to bitch about it to anyone who would listen rather than ever do anything about it.

The con man had taken him under his wing, even fed him some small stories while he was still making headway, just so he could pitch something to Frank. Ryan now saw the ruse for what it was, how deftly Horace had gained the confidence of a plucky young reporter so that when the protege finally broke a big one on their own, the first person they’d share it with was their office hero.

Ryan peered across the bullpen at Horace’s closed door. It still pierced his heart how quickly Horace had scooped up the story after Ryan had shared it with him during their daily afternoon coffee break.

The clarity of hindsight left him pining for the opportunity to have kept the story to himself, or better yet, to have an even greater story up his sleeve.

But he didn’t have a promising prospect of a scoop. Sitting glumly at his desk, he didn’t have anything on the horizon in any aspect of his life. The only thing he had to look forward to was an invite to his brother’s poker game. The only catch was it was being held at his brother’s job, and the last thing he wanted was to freeze his ass off all night on Baltimore’s inner harbor.

Oh if I could do it over again, I’d feed him a line of bull. But that thief will know better than to trust any story I give him after what he just pulled.

Ryan was so caught up in the thought he didn’t notice his desk phone ringing until his neighbor begged him to answer it. He did so sheepishly, but his embarrassment quickly faded away when he recognized the voice on the other end of the line.

“I’ve got something for you. Got a pen handy? Believe me, you’re gonna want to write this down.”